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Stokoe believed the book, entitled Realms of Gold, would be, "in my own biased opinion, a wonderful souvenir of the Ruth they know and love" 40 Family, friends, and colleagues agreed, purchasing every copy available.
In 1993 Stokoe was featured in a number of magazine and newspaper articles, among them Smithsonian magazine, the New York
Times (a prominent mention, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and Deaf Life (a three-part article).
In February of 1994 Stokoe had lunch with Dorothy Casterline and her husband, Jim, and Carl Croneberg and his wife, Eleanor.
"We all had a most wonderful time" he says. "It was as if the thirty years since we were working on the dictionary hadn't happened. It still astonishes me that I have so many friends in the Deaf world despite my lack of fluency in signing and worse skill at conversational ASL."41
Stokoe, David Armstrong, and Sherman Wilcox, a linguist, had been collaborating since 1992 on a book to be published by
Cambridge University Press. Entitled Gesture and the Nature of Language, the book came out in 1994 and was widely acclaimed in the linguistic community. It is vintage Stokoe, combining the authors' research in their own fields with studies in biology, communication, and culture to prove that language cannot be understood apart from everything that makes us human.
Stokoe feels that this book will be another step in the progress toward full recognition of American Sign Language.
The real revolution has only begun. The revolution of 1988 put King Jordan in the university president's chair and made
Phil Bravin chairman of its board some state schools for the deaf now have Deaf superintendents the public is intrigued instead of offended by the sight of someone signing. But all of this is only a slight change indirection. A complete revolution traverses 360 degrees. Ever since Samuel Heinicke argued that there is no real language without speech, experts and the public have trusted their own (limited) experience, ignored the testimony and examples of deaf people, and taken speech to be language, language to be speech.
But Armstrong, Wilcox, and I read the evidence still coming infrom fossils to brain scansas turning the revolu-

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